How to Choose a Consulting Firm?

 

Are all consultants equally qualified and offering the same services?

Once you’ve decided you would benefit from the help of an accreditation consulting firm, the next step is to select the best one for your organization. Everybody claims to be qualified, but are they all equally qualified? Are they even offering the same set of services as each other?

The answer to both questions is simple:

Absolutely not!

 

What makes IHS different?

IHS’s Unique Organizational Excellence

Our firm has unparalleled expertise in URAC standards and processes. This is reflected both at the organization level and at the individual consultant level.

URAC Certification

Integral Healthcare Solutions (“IHS”) is the only accreditation consulting firm that URAC has certified under its Health Care Management Certification Program. We believe that our willingness to go through the same sort of rigorous URAC process that our clients go through is a demonstration of our commitment to high performance through elective independent validation that quality management principles are applied to our daily operations.

Unmatched Veteran Accreditation Support Team

Our senior team has deep experience with URAC's standards, and in fact have both trained many of the current URAC reviewers and helped draft many of the standards over the years.

The team we are proposing to work on your project is the following:

  • Thomas G. Goddard, JD, PhD, Chief Executive Officer and Senior Consultant

  • Lesley Malus Reed, MHSA, President and Senior Consultant

  • Susan DeMarino, RN, MSHS, CPHQ, RNC, Chief Clinical Officer and Senior Consultant

  • Jill Paslier, PharmD, CSP, FISMP, Chief Operating Officer and Senior Consultant

  • Carole Crawford, RN, BSN, Senior Consultant

  • Maureen Plumstead, RN, MBA, CPHQ, PCMH CCE, Senior NCQA Consultant

  • Evelyn B. Burde, BSN, MBA, Associate Consultant

  • Jeffrey Sutch, Associate Consultant

  • Jezebel James, AccreditNet Specialist

  • Stephanie Harris, Executive Assistant

In this team, you'll find the deepest and most current URAC experience of any consulting team in the country. You can find our bios here.

World-class technology, including the Goldfinch Accreditation Management System

In addition to accreditation-compliant template policies, a proprietary online training system ("AccrediTrain"), and hundreds of pages of online interpretive guidance, IHS offers our clients, throughout the engagement, the use of the Goldfinch Accreditation Management System, a unique online interface between our expert consultants and our clients. As I would be delighted to show you in an online demonstration, we've woven all parts of the accreditation process, from the initial gap analysis through the final validation review, into Goldfinch, allowing our clients and consultants to act as one seamless team. You may schedule a demonstration of Goldfinch by scheduling a call with our CEO.

 

How can I compare accreditation consulting firms?

To help you select the consulting firm that is right for your organization, IHS has created a free resource that not only helps you ask the right questions, but also provides IHS’s answers to those questions.

Fill out the form, below, and we’ll send you that tool at no cost!